Why don’t we start by traveling back in time to 1999? Back then strategy consulting was an absolute blast. Great salary, exotic locations, challenging assignments and world class clients. One month in South Africa, the next in Thailand. It was brilliant.  

Strategy consulting was my life in those days. Asides from advising clients, I was also heavily involved in the recruitment of new staff. I saw first-hand what it was that made consulting firms invite some candidates to interview whilst rejecting others. Why it was that some people really shone in their interviews and case studies whilst other stronger candidates blew it at the interview stages.

Anyway around that time I moved on from consulting to launch my own business Top-Consultant.com - and it was your classic dot-com start-up... You can picture the setup - working from a front room having built the first website myself; being the receptionist, account manager and finance director all at once (and everything else in between!). Now we're a strong business with a sizeable team and a great client list, but back then it was tough...

Why am I telling you all this?  

Why am I telling you all this? Well by way of background really. You see I'm going to share here a checklist to help you beat the competition and secure your dream job in consulting. But why should you listen to my advice until you've established for yourself that I know this subject inside out, right? So that's why I'm telling you my story. You can skip right on ahead to the checklist now if you already know how I've learned so much about impressing consultancy recruiters. But to all newcomers I wanted you to see that I know what I’m talking about and for you to understand how it is that I’m able to help so many candidates to secure their dream job in consulting.

Anyway, back to the meat of the story. So I'd spent several years as a consultant myself, which gave me many valuable insights. But it's been my role here at Top-Consultant that's made me the number one expert on the subject of “securing a fast-track career in consulting”. You see since resigning from consulting in late 1999, I've spent a considerable portion of my professional life working with recruiters from most of the world's leading consulting firms. Because our main day-to-day business here at Top-Consultant.com is helping consulting firms to find and hire new talent.  

We've got over 500 clients now and I've heard it said that we probably have a better address book of consultancy recruiters than anyone else on the planet! That may well be true, but what is undoubtedly true is that there's no-one else out there with a greater understanding of who is hiring - and why - than our team and my personal contacts in the consulting world.  

Checklist for Success

The fact that you're still reading must mean you're pretty serious about pursuing a consulting career and I commend you for this - consulting is a great career option and I'll certainly never regret the years I spent working as a consultant. Below are the success principles I promised you for securing a career in consulting. Take a few minutes to review these and honestly assess how you could change the way you're going about trying to secure a fast-track role in consulting. Very few candidates I speak to can honestly say they're doing all the things I recommend below!

These changes alone will dramatically enhance your chances of securing your dream job in consulting. As I mentioned before, we do work with one hundred of our 300,000 readers each month and share with those people all our insider tips & market knowledge. If having reviewed my checklist you'd like to be one of the 100 readers we take under our wing in the coming month then you'll find further details of our Consulting Masterclass course further down the page. But first let's run through those checkpoints:

Checkpoint 1 - You must understand the hierarchy of consulting firms

>> Consulting firms bill their clients (on an annualised basis) between £150,000 ($250,000) and £450,000 ($750,000) per consultant that works on their assignments. Clearly firms charging near the top of this range will only employ the very best of the best (meaning MBA graduates from the Top 10 business schools worldwide or University graduates from universities such as Oxford, Cambridge or Harvard). Firms charging lower fees per consultant have much larger consulting teams and therefore need to hire much larger volumes of new recruits. Their entry criteria are thus not quite so demanding and therefore securing a job with these firms will be somewhat easier / more attainable.

What is crystal clear is that you MUST target the right group of firms for someone with your background, since the consultancies charging the higher fees will simply not consider hiring someone unless they have impeccable academics - regardless of how well written your CV / resume is and regardless of how well you can perform at interview. So do take the time to figure out the hierarchy of consulting firms and therefore the subset of firms that you should be applying to.

Checkpoint 2 - You must tailor every single job application you make

>> The competition for consulting jobs is extremely high and more often than not candidates underestimate how many strong candidates they will be competing with for any given job. In such an environment it is crucial that you make the very best impression possible - and that can only be achieved by revising your CV and cover letter for each and every application you make. Each consultancy is looking for a different balance of skills and so applying with a generic CV is always going to put you at a disadvantage compared with a candidate that has made the effort to sell their suitability for each and every role they apply for.

In my experience, failing to sell yourself properly through adequate tailoring of your CV will often be the difference between a good candidate securing lots of interview offers and lots of rejections. So if you are going to take the time to apply for consulting jobs, take a few minutes extra to give your applications your very best shot. 

Checkpoint 3 - You must be aware of the Pros and Cons of consulting

>> The consulting lifestyle is tough. Whilst it pays well and can open many doors for you later in your career, it is also very demanding. The work can involve long hours, being away from home for lengthy periods, spells of very high pressure and so on. There is nothing that will turn an interviewer off faster than you showing a lack of understanding about the reality of the day-to-day consulting lifestyle. What is equally true is that doing your research on a firm so that you know the types of assignments they undertake and where you might find yourself posted will go a long way towards impressing an interviewer that you are cut out for the rollercoaster consulting lifestyle.

Checkpoint 4 - You must be adequately prepared for the case study interviews

>> You cannot expect to be made a job offer unless you perform strongly in the case study interviews. This part of the selection procedure allows you to be seen performing in an environment / scenario that closely resembles an everyday consultant's work. However amazing your CV / resume might be, there'll be no job offer for you if you fail to impress in the case studies.

Many of the firms have developed variants on the case study theme, incorporating presentations, panel interviews and good cop / bad cop routines. This varies by firm and can even vary office by office. So do your homework before each interview so you know what you'll be faced with and can prepare accordingly.

Checkpoint 5 - You must know several strengths of each consulting firm you apply to

>> More often than not, consultants are high-flying individuals who are proud of their job and would rather be working for their current employer than any other consulting firm. This will be especially true of those consultants you meet during the interview phase. Whilst consultants would not be surprised to learn you are interviewing with some of their competitors, they will want to feel convinced that if offered a job you are likely to join the firm and help build on its success.

So it is critical that you research the consultancy before your interviews and are able to state some compelling factors that have attracted you to want to join that firm. This is particularly important with graduate recruitment where firms will typically have a quota of job offers that they can make - as a result they do not want to make job offers to people they feel will not accept them because this prevents them from making offers to other candidates who would have accepted. So you need to be a strong candidate and show enthusiasm to join the firm in order to get an offer.

By now you've probably got a fair few things to be thinking about?! All that remains for me to say is that I hope you've found these points to be a useful checklist and wish you every success in finding a rewarding career in consulting.